For a sensitive, interdisciplinary and intercultural science: epistemological challenges to rescue wisdom in the relationship between health, society and nature

Abstract

The article presents the foundations of a sensitive, interdisciplinary and intercultural science to imagine other relationships about health, society and nature inspired by references and authors from the social and human sciences, including and transcending sociology and anthropology, and collective health. This is a reflective essay on epistemological, theoretical and methodological issues which empirical and experiential basis comes from conceptual discussions and research on emancipatory health promotion among vulnerable territories and social groups, in particular indigenous peoples and from urban peripheries. Such researches and the employed methodologies seek to produce knowledges together with, and not just for, the communities and territories involved. The article defends a paradigmatic transition that creates conditions and possibilities for coexistence encounters of knowledges involving scientific and traditional knowledge systems situated around social problems and struggles for health, dignity and territorial rights. To better understand and overcome the limits of modern science, with its canons and specialized disciplines, it is proposed to rescue the wisdom lost by Eurocentric modernity in facing the various ongoing crises that have been plaguing the planet, the country, the territories and various ecosystems, in accelerated degradation processes.